Iván Álvarez Navia

Faat: freelance as a team

Agile methodologies are reliable engineering and management practices, capable of helping in the development of quality and successful software in business environments. However, most of these methodologies are centered on a development team and its internal communication. Moreover, for simplicity, a single product development is taken into account with its successive releases. There is another scenario: that of a single programmer working alone and often in much smaller projects and in several at the same time. Also in this scenario the client proximity is not as described by the agile environment ideal. In that case, the priorities and needs change, communication takes on another meaning and working mechanisms are not always comparable to that of a team. This paper introduces Faat (Freelance as a Team), a methodology specifically designed for those professionals. Integrating existing practices to the needs and possibilities of an individual programmer. However, it has been frequently considered the possible application of this methodology to small teams and/or other more general scenarios. This methodology has been tested in the web-based learning applications.

Personal Health Monitor

This paper introduces the Monitor de Salud Personal created by Telefonica I+D in cooperation with the Departamento de Informatica y Automatica of the University of Salamanca. This project fits within the activities related to the management of a “Digital Home”, and it is one of the projects that are currently under development in this field in Telefonica I+D. It is the aim of the project to explore various enabling technologies based on environmental intelligence, by means of which the user interacts with his or her home in various scenarios: home assistance and wellbeing, entertainment, identity management in a home environment, and location management in a home. The Monitor de Salud Personal we describe is intended to satisfy the objective of home assistance and wellbeing, and it fits well within Ambient Assisted Living Joint Programme of the European community [1].